Obama's 'bittergate' is campaign caricature

Published 10:00 pm, Saturday, April 26, 2008

There are virtues to a long campaign in a large, politically diverse country like the U.S.; the caricatures they produce are not among them.

John McCain isn't a warmonger. He never said we'd be in Iraq for 100 years, and his war views, even if you don't agree with them, are coherent and consistent. Hillary Clinton isn't a coward. She didn't face sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, though as first lady she did venture into a war-torn country.

And Barack Obama isn't an elitist. When he graduated from Harvard Law School he didn't join a Wall Street firm or serve on the board of a big company; he became a community organizer at a fraction of what he could have made.

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Yet for most of last week, charges of elitism, growing out of comments he made about the "bitter" resentments of working folks, have dominated the news. At a sophomoric debate in Philadelphia, the questions zeroed in on "bittergate" right out of the box. There were no questions on health care, climate change or China.

This is a case study in what has been called the "feeding frenzy" of contemporary American politicians and media, and of the perils of cheap labels.

Sometimes campaign-formed stereotypes are pertinent. John Kerry did lack the common touch, and George W. Bush is incurious.

More often the stereotypes are irresponsible and lazy. Ronald Reagan wasn't an "amiable dunce," and Al Gore wasn't a serial liar.

Nor is Obama an out-of-touch, upscale, effete elitist.

Here is what he said: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and -- like a lot of small towns in the Midwest -- the jobs have been gone for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. It's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations."

This was inartfully worded at an unfortunate venue -- a private San Francisco fundraiser of chardonnay-and-brie liberals. It's also basically true.

Most people of faith aren't bitter and don't cling to religion out of insecurity. Obama didn't say that.

What he did say is that some frustrated, even bitter, people turn more to religion as a salve, a salvation. Sometimes that's good -- the church was the underpinning of the American civil rights movement.

Sometimes it's bad; in the most extreme case, religious fundamentalist terrorists have flourished in states that have failed politically or economically like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

In the U.S., religious conservatives were politically active in the first part of the last century. Then, embarrassed by the Scopes trial on evolution and the folly of Prohibition, they were largely politically quiescent for half a century.

Three decades ago, playing on their anger and bitterness over the political and economic system, people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reactivated them. It's not questioning the sincerity of their beliefs to note that some of these followers cling to religion as an answer to their frustrations. Talk to them.

And the driving force of the gun lobby's success is that politicians don't care about you and are out to get you. Most hunters and gun owners are like most people of faith; it's a natural and healthy way of life. The National Rifle Association and others, however, play on insecurities to rile up an often unhealthy culture.

Similarly, nativism, or anti-immigration sentiment, is stoked today, as it was a century ago, by frustrations and bitterness.

The correlation to political promises or success is dicier. Yet Pennsylvania, the subject of this contretemps, historically is notable for its lack of political leaders.

There has been only one American president from this large state, James Buchanan, from 1857 to 1861, probably the worst in U.S. history. During the last century, there hasn't been a single leading national politician from Pennsylvania.

(To be sure, there have been some superb political leaders: Democratic mayors like the late Richardson Dilworth in Philadelphia and Republican governors like Bill Scranton; none ever rose to the highest plateau of American politics.)

Judging by polls and conversations with some voters, rank- and-file Pennsylvanians see through the phoniness of bittergate.

In Bristol -- a working- and middle-class community in lower Bucks County that has lost its manufacturing plants in recent decades -- several Obama supporters dismissed this flap. Over lunch, they worried that the controversy over Obama's former pastor might linger; by contrast, they say, the elitist rap is only about politics and the media's obsessions.

"I can't understand why they pounced on this," says Anthony Angellilli, a 78-year-old retired roofer. Not long ago, he notes, he returned to work part-time as a maintenance man at a book factory. He was replaced by cheaper and, he says, illegal immigrants: "Yeah, I'm bitter about that."

This Mill Street Cafe lunch crowd hopes Obama's candidacy is an antidote to these resentments.

The surrealness of the "elitism" episode crystallized when former House Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich declared it showed that Obama doesn't "understand normal Americans."

This is from a man who gave his first wife her walking papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery; his second marriage dissolved when he had an affair with a House staff member while he was leading the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex.